Friday, June 3, 2016

Perception.

I was standing in front of the Tyrell’s
downstairs bathroom mirror. It was a June morning in 1970 and I was getting
ready to go to convocation day at UBC. That was 46 years and four days ago. I
couldn’t get my hair to look right so I went to our upstairs bathroom where there
were hinged mirrors that allowed me to see the back of my head.

It sucked the life and breath out of me to
see that I was going bald. Six months later, most of my hair was gone. I
considered a wig for about a minute but imagining it slipping off during wild
and passionate sex prevented me from getting one; integrity trumped being fake.

Many years later and long before computers
would change how strangers meet, I was sitting in the Nice train station
waiting to meet someone I’d never met. I had made a sign with my name on it but
I had forgotten it so I was worrying about how we would find each other when
all of a sudden there he was, right before me, asking me if I were me in with a
confident air.

As we walked to my apartment along Rue de
France on a stretch of sidewalk that’s about a foot wide, we had to walk a
block single file and prevented from pointing out the sites, my thinking had me
realized that I had probably been described as “the youngest looking totally
bald person: he’d see in the station. The thing I most hated about my
appearance had become my defining characteristic. And so it is with stuttering.

“Hi. I’m c-c-c-c-calling about my
c-c-c-c-car?”

“I’ll get Raj right away, Mr. Loranger.”

I was in my car calling to ask where I
should park my car. I could see her through the window. She was wearing her
phone on her hip and had ear buds in her ears. She had no call display so I
knew my stutter was my aural avatar.

In the 1980s I met a guy who became a
roommate for five years and we became fast friends. Ever since, when I have
referenced him in conversation, someone has very often referenced his excessive
handsomeness. He is classically tall, dark and handsome. That is his defining
characteristic. Were he waiting to meet a stranger in a train station, his
visitor would be seeking “the tallest, handsomest man in the room.”

When I wrote my screenplay I was asked to
explain what it was about in forty words or less. I found it impossible, so I
asked the man who bought the screenplay why he wanted me to do it. He told me
what I was writing was a logline — a seductive synopsis of a screenplay used
for marketing the film.

I decided I couldn’t do it. I was too close
to it. So I asked my editor to write it. I believed my screenplay would get a
better logline from an objective whose perception would be far more aligned
with that of viewers of the film; my screenplay is autobiographical.

I think knowledge of how others perceive us
(or our work) is vital for a healthy personal and professional self-concept.
Those who know us well tend to describe us by our values; strangers must use
sound bytes and visual indicators to form the “logline” with which they will describe
us.

When we are young, we try to shape perception
of us with carefully chosen words in our CVs, interviews and applications and
in our digital presences. We want positively connoted identifiers. Post-retirement
we are freed from all that if we are lucky. I know people my age still addicted
to ambition that jars like leggings and long dyed hair on women beyond that
certain age.

I consider it a worthwhile objective to
have one’s self-concept match objective perception.

We don’t get to choose how others describe
us and not everyone is so easily trademarked. Only those of us with striking
visual or auditory assets or deficiencies can be so readily identified.